A 23-year-old New Zealand woman is sharing her “terrifying” reaction to medication she took for depression, claiming it “burned me from the inside out” and nearly killed her.
Charlotte Gilmour developed Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS), a rare disorder that gave her painful blisters on her skin, mouth and esophagus, the New Zealand outlet Stuff reported.
SJS begins with flu-like symptoms followed by a rash that blisters and spreads, according to the Mayo Clinic. The condition is fatal in 10% of patients.
Doctors believe that Gilmour developed the severe reaction, which only affects one in a million people worldwide, from lamotrigine. SJS is a known but rare side effect of the antiepileptic drug, which is also used to lift depression.
Gilmour, from Palmerston North, said she had been dealing with a chest infection for weeks before waking up one morning with a painful rash on her body. It’s unclear if the chest infection was related to the SJS.
“I looked in the mirror, and I just burst into tears. I think I subconsciously knew it was something quite serious,” she told Stuff.
She said she went to the hospital, where Filipino nurses recognized the rash because of similar cases in the Philippines but medical staff seemed unsure of how to treat it.
“It was scary, I guess, hearing … ‘OK, no one really knows a lot about this’,” Gilmour recalled.
“The scariest part about it is that it burned me from the inside out. So all the burns on the outside were because my insides were so burned that it started to manifest on the outside of my skin,” she bemoaned.
The blistering in her digestive tract was so bad that she needed to be hooked up to a feeding tube.
Doctors initially put her on steroids but stopped the medication after it didn’t seem to help her.
“So they stopped them … and then it just got worse and worse until there was one night it got so bad I pretty much lost my vision,” she remembered.
She asked to be put back on the drugs, which “definitely helped in the end,” she said.
She was discharged from the hospital in November after 30 days of treatment.
She said she has recovered but some symptoms still occasionally emerge.
“I still get blisters pop up in my eyes and the rash flares up, always in the same place where the worst burn was,” she described.
Gilmour isn’t the only New Zealander to have developed the painful condition after taking a mood stabilizer.
Nicole Donald, a young mom, was prescribed a range of pills to help level out her moods after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2020.
Two weeks later, she started to feel feverish and her lips began to bleed. Soon after, a red rash spread across her entire body. She, too, had SJS.
“It was so excruciatingly painful,” she told Jam Press last year. “My skin felt like it was sunburned all over, my lips and the inside of my mouth were bleeding and my eyes were burning.”
She added: “My vision started to become so blurry, I couldn’t use my phone or see my family. I couldn’t eat or drink as my mouth was full of ulcers and my tummy hurt so much.”
Luckily, she recovered two months later.
